Leaf Agriculture has raised $11.3 million in a Series A round.
Founded in 2018, Leaf provides food and agricultural companies and their software teams with access to user-permissioned data from a variety of sources, which saves time and resources and helps the companies deliver farm data related products without the hassle of creating different API connections or working with many different file types.
Today, companies collectively managing over 1 billion acres, work with Leaf to manage their data infrastructure.
In 2023, US farmers were collecting data on 72% of all available farmland. In 2013, this number was just 33%. Also, in 2023, 42% of farmers said that data had a major influence on their farm management decisions, up from just 10% in 2017. This increase in data collection and use has tremendously improved yields for the industry. However, it has also presented a new issue of data management and reconciliation.
Crop insurance, seed & chemical, biotech, agtech, cooperatives, and other companies all use farm data to improve their existing services and offer new products. Before Leaf, these companies attempted to build massive data infrastructure to manage and reconcile all of the weather, irrigation, imagery, tractor, and other data they were collecting. Not only did this process require a substantial investment, it also took hundreds of hours of ongoing engineering resources and development time to build, operate, and maintain.
Leaf created a single unified API where companies can easily access all of their data and focus on building new value with the data instead of building and maintaining messy integrations and data translation infrastructure.
G. Bailey Stockdale, the co-founder and CEO of Leaf, created the company to connect agriculture data while attempting to build agronomy tools for his family’s farm. Inspired by tools like Stripe & Plaid in finance, Twilio in telecom, or Nylas in communications, Leaf built a product that allows farm and agriculture companies to focus on creating value for their customers whilst smartly managing their resources.
“We chose to work with Leaf because of the efficiency multiplier for processing precision agriculture data. Working with Leaf allows our internal resources to focus on our agents and producers while cost effectively allowing us to scale our precision agriculture usage. We are looking forward to expanding our capabilities through our partnership with Leaf,” said Tyler Aring, assistant vice president of crop technology at AgriSompo.
Spero Ventures led the Series A funding round.
“Leaf’s mission of using technology to improve the lives of everyone involved in the farm and agriculture business resonated deeply with our mission. As lead investors, we see Leaf as a driving force in agricultural technology, enabling agricultural service providers to deliver value to farmers on a broader scale. We’re thrilled to be part of this journey and bring our B2B SaaS experience to support Leaf’s growth,” said Andrew Parker, general partner at Spero Ventures.
Leaf said it expects to use the funding to expand its suite of product offerings and partnerships. The company said it is also committed to refining its application programming interface and to investing in operations to support growth of the product and team.
Jim Cornall is editor of Future Food Today and publisher at Ayr Coastal Media. He is an award-winning writer, editor, photographer, broadcaster, designer and author. Contact Jim here.
